ABSTRACT

Governments do not exclusively buy from the cheapest bidder and increasingly use public procurement as a policy instrument to achieve wider environmental, innovative and social objectives. Past studies have shown the process of government contracting to be connected to political factors. This paper studies the extent to which politicians’ preferences for price and non-price criteria in the contract awarding stage are associated with politicians’ ideological reasoning (the Citizen Candidate model), and strategic reasoning (the Downsian approach). Politicians’ preferences are analysed through a discrete choice experiment. We find that politicians’ preferences for non-price criteria are strongly connected to ideological reasoning and to a limited extent to strategic reasoning. We also observe that, regardless of their political ideology and financial situation of the municipality, politicians are willing to look beyond price, and consider environmental, innovative and social criteria when awarding contracts.

摘要

政府并不只从最便宜的投标者那里购买，而是越来越多地将公共采购作为实现更广泛的环境、创新和社会目标的政策工具。过去的研究表明，政府承包过程与政治因素有关。本文研究了政治家在合同授予阶段对价格和非价格标准的偏好与政治家的意识形态推理（公民候选人模型）和战略推理（唐斯方法）的关联程度。通过离散选择实验分析政治家的偏好。我们发现，政治家对非价格标准的偏好与意识形态推理密切相关，在有限程度上与战略推理相关。我们还观察到，